Corpus-driven Linguistics/Web as Corpus

Date:	3rd- 6th October 2005
Place:	Rambla - Aula 230
Tutor:	Adam Kilgarriff Lexicography MasterClass and University of Sussex, UK

This is an exciting time for our understanding of language.  Linguists are becoming familiar with corpora, and so the possibilities they offer are now beginning to open up.  Language-processing tools like part-of-speech taggers are also now reaching a level of maturity, so we can work with corpora that handle lemmas and grammar as well as simple word forms. The next level, word senses, raises a number of issues.  The workshop will describe what is now possible. 

• Tools:   
• the Sketch Engine combines very fast corpus access with grammatical analysis to provide “word sketches" are one-page summaries of a word's grammatical and collocational behaviour
• practical session using the Sketch Engine
• Corpora: 
• design principles and sampling issues
• use of the web as a corpus, covering theoretical issues of representativeness and text type. 
• practical session in which participants use the BootCat tool to generate their own web-derived corpora (subject to successful installation of software)

• Word senses
• what are they?
• how do we handle the complications they introduce?
• how good are people, and computers, at the disambiguation task?

Draft programme

October, 3rd	Kilgarriff_1	Corpus-driven linguistics research programme Practical: using the Sketch Engine
October, 4th	Kilgarriff_2	Web as Corpus Corpus Creation
October, 5th	Kilgarriff_3	Practical: BootCat tools, creating and examining your own web corpus
October, 6th	Kilgarriff_4	Word senses: theoretical and lexicographic perspectives Practical: finding word senses